What you actually keep after OTA commission

What an OTA commission calculator actually does

An OTA commission calculator translates the price on your channel manager into the price you actually keep. The number on the Booking.com extranet is the gross rate. The number that lands in your bank account is the gross rate minus the OTA commission, minus the payment processor fee, minus any channel manager surcharge. That difference, applied across every channel you sell on, is the gap between the revenue you think you are making and the revenue you actually retain.

Used correctly, the calculator converts three intuitive but unhelpful questions (is Booking.com expensive, should we run a direct promotion, is parity worth defending) into one concrete answer: what is the euro value of each channel decision per month and per year.

The three formulas this calculator uses

How to read your net ADR

A typical 60-room European independent in 2026 sells at a gross ADR of 180 euros, with 60% of bookings flowing through Booking.com at 15% commission and a 2.5% payment processor fee. The per-booking math gives a net ADR of 180 x 0.85 x 0.975 = 149.18 euros. Direct bookings of the same room at 175 euros gross with 2.5% payment fee net 170.63 euros. The lower-priced direct rate is structurally 21 euros more profitable per booking.

On the monthly leakage formula, the same hotel doing 200,000 euros of monthly room revenue with 60% OTA share at 17% blended commission is paying 20,400 euros every month, or 244,800 euros per year, in OTA fees. Shifting 10 percentage points of that share to direct (the realistic target for an independent running a serious 90-day direct-booking program) recovers roughly 16,800 euros per year net of the direct-channel payment fee. Shifting 20 points recovers 33,600 euros. Both numbers exceed the all-in cost of running a metasearch program and a basic CRM combined.

Benchmarks that bound the calculator

• Booking.com base commission: 15% (Antravia 2026, Hospitality Net 2026); Genius and Preferred Partner tiers add 4 to 7 percentage points on top.
• Expedia commission: 18 to 25% for independent hotels, often closer to 25% on the Standard model (Hospitality Net 2026).
• Direct booking payment fee: 2 to 3% with a modern tokenizing processor (Stripe, Adyen, Mews Payments, Cloudbeds Payments, Prostay Pay).
• Metasearch effective CPA via Google Hotel Ads: 8 to 14% of booking value (Foundry CRO 2026); below the average OTA cost, above direct booking cost.
• Independent hotel OTA share in 2025: 63.4% on average (Cloudbeds 2026 State of Independents Report); some markets approach 80%.

Four mistakes that distort the calculation

First, forgetting Genius and Preferred Partner surcharges. The headline 15% Booking.com commission becomes 18 to 22% once you opt into Genius (effective contractual discount) and Preferred Partner (4% placement surcharge). The calculator's commission input should reflect your blended effective rate, not the base contract rate.

• Second, double counting payment fees on OTAs. Booking.com and Expedia absorb the payment fee on their merchant-of-record bookings; you only pay it on direct, your virtual credit card collections, and a small subset of OTA setups. Apply the fee to the direct side only or you will overstate OTA cost.
• Third, ignoring cancellation rates. Gross commission reconciles to net commission only after cancellations are deducted. OTA cancellation rates run about 21.8% (Cloudbeds 2026) versus 10.6% for direct, so the per-stay effective commission is lower than the per-booking commission. Both versions are useful but they answer different questions.
• Fourth, treating OTA as a pure cost line. OTAs deliver demand you would not otherwise capture, especially in distant source markets. The right calculation compares OTA cost against the cost of the marketing program that would replace the same volume of demand through direct, not against zero.